Eckhart Tolle

Eckhart Tolle
Eckhart Tolleis a German-born resident of Canada, best known as the author of The Power of Now and A New Earth: Awakening to your Life's Purpose. In 2011, he was listed by Watkins Review as the most spiritually influential person in the world. In 2008, a New York Times writer called Tolle "the most popular spiritual author in the United States"...
NationalityGerman
ProfessionSelf-Help Author
Date of Birth16 February 1948
CityLunen, Germany
CountryGermany
Joy does not come from what you do, it flows into what you do and thus into this world from deep within you.
Life is now. There was never a time when your life was not now, nor will there ever be.
Pain can only feed on pain. Pain cannot feed on joy. It finds it quite indigestible.
The moment you become aware of the ego in you, it is strictly speaking no longer the ego, but just an old, conditioned mind-pattern. Ego implies unawareness. Awareness and ego cannot coexist.
The mind, conditioned as it is by the past, always seeks to re-create what it knows and is familiar with. Even if it is painful, at least it is familiar. The mind always adheres to the known. The unknown is dangerous because it has no control over it. That's why the mind dislikes and ignores the present moment.
Stress means there is something wrong, and you are not aligned with life.
With stillness comes the benediction of peace”. “Thinking isolates a situation or event and calls it good or bad, as if it had a separate existence. Through excessive reliance on thinking, reality becomes fragmented. This fragmentation is an illusion, but seems very real while you are trapped in it.
I never went out and said, "I want to do this." I never do that. I wait for things to come to me, either within or without, and I go along with it.
All true artists, whether they know it or not, create from a place of no-mind, from inner stillness.
To recognize one's own insanity is, of course, the arising of sanity, the beginning of healing and transcendence.
Life isn't as serious as the mind makes it out to be.
Pleasure is always derived from something outside you, whereas joy arises from within.
There is a fine balance between honoring the past and losing yourself in it. For example, you can acknowledge and learn from mistakes you made, and then move on and refocus on the now. It is called forgiving yourself.
What the future holds for you depends on your state of consciousness now.